{"id":4654,"title":"The Whitney Museum and the Shaping of Video Art: An Interview with John Hanhardt","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/whitney-museum-and-shaping-video-art-interview-john-hanhardt","version":"e65a7cc5668e09b68ebeaeafe966b5a9b63d0dce3bc85e38aa9d5832a3bd8bfe","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.9244118+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Marita Sturken"}],"authorKeys":["Sturken, Marita"],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Afterimage","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Visual Studies Workshop","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"May 1983","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Rochester, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"10","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"10","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0860","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"John Hanhardt","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022The Whitney Museum and the Shaping of Video Art: An Interview with John Hanhardt.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/whitney-museum-and-shaping-video-art-interview-john-hanhardt.","publication":"Marita Sturken. The Whitney Museum and the Shaping of Video Art: An Interview with John Hanhardt. Afterimage. Visual Studies Workshop. May 1983.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4654.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0860","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":42446},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":604}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"John Hanhardt is curator of film and video at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He is responsible for the initial inclusion and further integration of video into the Whitney\u0027s exhibition program, as well as its program in independent film. The video shown at the Whitney has comprised an internationally diverse program of narrative, performance, documentary, and image-processed work, as well as installations. There is little doubt that Hanhardt is, at present, the most influential American curator in video. His program at the Whitney is the most visible in this country for two reasons: first, video is included in the Museum\u0027s Biennial, providing recognition by exhibiting video with established art forms; second, Hanhardt has been successful in producing certain large exhibitions at the Whitney-most recently, the Nam June Paik retrospective which he curated last year. The text printed here represents an edited transcript of three interviews conducted in February and March, 1983. It includes Hanhardt\u0027s additions and corrections. Marita Sturken: What did you do before you came to the Whitney? John Hanhardt: I completed graduate work at New York University\u0027s Department of Cinema Studies. Film had been a sort of hobby through college. Rochester\u0027s my home town, and I used to spend a lot of time at the George Eastman House looking at films. George Pratt and James Card are good friends. I ran the film society at the University of Rochester and wrote reviews for the college newspaper, but my academic work as an undergraduate and graduate student was in linguistics and psychology. I later decided to transfer to film studies in graduate school because, like video, it\u0027s an area that is open to interpretation and analysis. I was interested in applying my interests in linguistics to film. It is such a multi-disciplinary medium-moving image, recorded sound, narrative, nonnarrative - and it confronts so many issues of artmaking. I was fortunate at NYU to receive a curatorial internship in the Museum of Modern Art\u0027s department of film. The internship didn\u0027t continue because of funding problems, but it was ideal in that Willard Van Dyke (then director of MOMA\u0027s department of film) gave me the opportunity to work in all areas of the department-the Film Study Center, the Film Stills Archive, and the film archive itself. I began the \u0022What\u0027s Happening\u0022 documentary series with Van Dyke, and we co-authored a report on short film production, distribution, and exhibition for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I also became active in the Flaherty Film Seminar. Then, in 1972, I was offered a position at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as film coordinator, where I established the film department and began the film study collection. There was a precedent for a film program, but I was given the opportunity to fully develop and place the program in a larger context. I went from the Walker to the Whitney as curator and head of the department in 1974. That means I\u0027ve been associated with three major, contemporary modern art institutions, and three very different ones-the large Museum of Modern Art, which had set the precedent of bringing photography, film, and architectural design into a museum; the Walker, which is highly innovative under its director (Martin Friedman), where I was able to learn about working within a smaller institution and developing a program; and the Whitney, where I inherited a very strong situation. David Bienstock had already established the film department here-\u0022The New American Filmmaker Series\u0022-and made it an important, visible, and unique program. I came here a year after his death in 1974, a move both interesting and challenging. You can really focus on the history of an art form in such a situation. I introduced an emphasis on the avant-garde, documentary, and narrative programs. My goals were to integrate the department more fully, curatorially and in terms of exhibitions info the museum, to keep its identity but to develop a situation where it wouldn\u0027t be seen as somehow separate. One of the things I could build on, which David had started, was week-long exhibitions of film that gave maximum exposure to a program as a theatrical run. When I decided to move into video, I wanted to show it in the same fashion, with appropriate seating arrangements. I realized that with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, which gave us the funding to get the initial hardware and to rewire the theater, I could bring to video what we had in film. For video to work as a medium and to show installation work, it needs in-house museum support. You need a video technician maintaining the equipment, so that the notion of technology as things that break down will be overcome. That meant convincing the museum to do for video what it did for painting and sculpture in the installation of work. The preparation of exhibitions, program notes, advertising, and payment of artists\u0027 fees created a supportive situation. I firmly believe in a program having a point of view, being selective, and staking an interest-not making film and video conform to the other arts but changing one\u0027s definition of art by putting new forms and ideas within a larger, historical and critical context. MS: What was the first video exhibition at the Whitney? JH: David Bienstock did a program in 1971 called \u0022A Special Videotape Show.\u0022 It was very important for the Whitney, and also for New York museums. MS: The first Biennial to include video was in 1975? JH: That was the first to include a comprehensive selection of video, but in the 1973 Biennial there were seven videotapes and one installation, selected by the curators of painting and sculpture. It was important that video was represented in the 1973 Biennial-certainly very important for my efforts-but it wasn\u0027t recognized fully until 1975. In the 1977 Biennial we had video, and then in 1979 we showed both film and video. MS: How was it that video was accepted into the Biennial before film? JH: Video, as it emerged, had particular ties to the art world - with Richard Serra, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, and other artists. There was a perception of video as a medium that conceptual artists and performance artists used. Film, of course, had a much longer history-not that it didn\u0027t touch the other arts, but it wasn\u0027t as easily placed in that context. I think that one of my most important moves here was to bring both video and film into the Biennial. MS: After the Biennial, your first big show was \u0022Projected Video,\u0022 in June 1975. JH: That was actually a project that my predecessor, David Bienstock, and his associate curator, Bruce Rubin, had been thinking about. In the selection of tapes and the program notes I tried to address the issue of the projected format and its relationship to the monitor, the feeling being that any projected system changed the perception of a work created for the monitor. I chose work that would be suitable for projection. I wanted to raise the issue of the limitations of projection. MS: I suppose there weren\u0027t many projection systems around in 1975. JH: It was not that common. We used the Advent projection system. There was a lot of interest in it-Newsweek wrote an article on it. Now we use projection only when it\u0027s the artist\u0027s intention that the work be shown that way. For instance, we presented Vito Acconci\u0027s The Red Tapes in projection because it was created for that format. MS: What were the other big shows you did before the Paik retrospective? JH: A very important show was \u0022Re-Vision: Projects and Proposals in Film and Video\u0022 in 1979, when we organized for the first time-I believe it was the first time in New York-a large museum exhibition devoted to film and video as installation forms. It took up the entire third floor of the museum. Though the film/video gallery is a flexible space where we can present all different types of video and film; we propose installations and exhibitions for the other spaces in the museum. MS: Subject to approval by whom? JH: It is presented for general curatorial review, in our weekly meetings. MS: You must have a receptive situation. JH: The staff has been supportive. I should add that for the museum, which was founded for and has remained committed to contemporary art, the film and video department does represent a commitment to vanguard developments in the visual arts. One lays the groundwork for that. Video has been supported by Tom Armstrong, the director. Mrs. Flora Biddle, the president of the Whitney, was very active in the establishment of the film department in 1970, as was Marcia Tucker, who was painting and sculpture curator here before she became the director of the New Museum. MS: So the \u0022Re-Visions\u0022 show was the first exhibition, beside the Biennials, where video was presented outside its regular gallery space? JH: Yes. It was a serious show. I\u0027m proud of it because it looked at the issue of representation-how the recording medium of film works as opposed to that of video. The film installations were by Michael Snow, Morgan Fisher, and William Anastasi. All the video was closed circuit. Except for Snow\u0027s installation, all the pieces were site-specific. Buky Schwartz did Videoconstruction, in which the camera was positioned near the ceiling and pointed into a gallery space where there was a painted area you could walk on. What you saw on the monitor was a yellow triangle, so from the point of view of the camera-closed-circuit, real-time-the two-dimensional properties of the medium flattened the three-dimensional space of the gallery into an object visible only on the monitor. Only when you were in the gallery could you see what was happening. Another video piece was Rumored Innuendo, by Bill Bierne, which used four closed-circuit surveillance cameras in different locations in the museum. There was one in the restaurant, one in a curator\u0027s office, one in the lobby, and one on the stairway. All of these were non-exhibition, public spaces. The camera was not visible, but the area that the camera covered was marked, and there was a label. There were also four microphones-in the lobby, in a stairwell, in my office, and near the phones. The area picked up by each microphone was marked out and labeled. You could see and hear this on the second floor, but you could never see yourself because the camera was always somewhere else. Bierne had performers regularly come in and act like the public. One camera was above an associate curator\u0027s desk, and every now and then Bierne would mail a photograph or something which the curator would put in his IN box. Who was performing or what was performed was at issue, as well as how an area became visible as a performance space by the placement of a camera and microphone. The third video piece was Cloud Music, by Bob Watts, David Behrman, and Bob Diamond. The camera was pointed at the sky through the window on the third floor, and there was a video synthesizer and audio analyzer. There were black marks -sensitizers-on the screen, which could be moved by the artist, and became a score. As the light intensity changed at these marks, it set off a harmonic change that filled the room with sound. The clouds and the sky composed and generated the sound. People would sit there for hours. Between the \u0022Re-Visions\u0022 show and the Paik show, there was one other installation-the large Walt Disney animation show, \u0022Disney Animations and Animators.\u0022 MS: Was the impetus for the Paik show his work or the desire to have a major retrospective? JH: The desire was to represent Paik\u0027s work and the only way to do so comprehensively and effectively was in a large exhibition. MS: So it had to be a show of that magnitude? JH: I felt that was in order. I felt what was central to his work was the full range of his objects, from the Fluxus robot to the large installation pieces, and that we would be uniquely suited to do it on our fourth floor. MS: Did you think of the show as ","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":42446,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}